msbelle, I thought Bridget Jones became throughly unlikable. Her self-obsession just became too much for me and the shallowness plus the flimsy plot made it not so much fun.

I loved My Antonia for the language and the landscape -- the sense of spaciousness, the world rolling out, the heroine capable of anything but for the constrictions of family and society (I think -- it's been a while). I was a NYer and an urban East Coaster and a snotty college kid, and I loved cities and dense hilly forests; I had no desire to go to the Midwest at all -- and My Antonia gave me an appreciation of a landscape I'd always vaguely thought of as flat, dull, and ugly.

I think it's got some beginning-novel flaws, even though it wasn't Cather's first, most notably some problems hooking up the mythic dimensions Antonia as a kind of new American/Old World legend with the smaller, psychological and social dimensions required by the plot -- but I do think it's magnificent.

Other Cather has been hit-or-miss for me. Can't stand The Professor's House or My Mortal Enemy, love the relatively obscure Lucy Gayheart.

My favorite Hardy novel is The Woodlanders, because it's wistful. But I haven't read much of him.

Nutty, I'm with you on the Count becoming much worse than the people who hurt him. He become a cardboard cut out of a person.

She *wants* to be what he expects her to be, but her innate self-respect will not allow her to.

I wrote a paper in college about how this makes Jane Eyre a feminist novel, versus Wuthering Heights, which is so very not.

I can't imagine reading Dickens for fun. He was marginally tolerable to plow through for school, but even the ones I didn't dislike (I'm sure there was one) -- it wasn't rewarding in any fashion.

I did try and read extracurricular Dickens during my period where I tried to read any book/play/poem from which I'd heard a quotation I wanted to use in conversation.

Thankfully, I'm over that now.

Oh, and does anyone else have classics/works of the canon that they love but figure everyone else hates? I think Pilgrim's Progress is fascinating as an historical document and an insight into how Bunyan read scripture and understood theology. And I find the allegory itself bizarrely compelling.

When I'm reading Great Expectations, I'm always surprised by how funny and lively it is -- because when I'm not reading it, what I mostly remember is how much the narrator hates himself. It is the only book which I find more painful to remember than to read.

I had an interesting experience with Jane Eyre in that I'd manage not to read it until college, when I had to familiarize myself with it in conjunction with reading Wide Sargasso Sea.

I'm not sure that I can ever love Jane Eyre now, because of that introduction to it.

Also, JZ speaks for me.

Also Suela in re limitations of the thread.

I can't remember enough of My Antonia to comment on it. I don't remember responding to it strongly (at age 12), though.

Great Expectations. I think it has grown in richness over the years, for me. I read it at age 14, and also saw a British miniseries about it that was very faithful. (John Rhys-Davies as Joe Gargery -- gave me a perfect bead on his character.) When I was 14, I found the ending very annoying, because it did not seem to resolve a single thing about the Pip/Snot-nosed Girl interaction. (The 1940s movie version has a VERY dramatic ending, which is very emotionally satisfying, but flies in the face of the book.)

I can't think about the whole of the book and have it hang together. So, that's a criticism. Then again, so many little parts of the story jump out at me -- Jaggers washing his hands after every law-case; Jaggers's clark and his vast, unreflective love for his Aged P.; poor Joe Gargery and his battered dignity; Miss Havisham hobbling about the house in a rotting image of her life from 30 years previous.

Actually I think the weakest part of it all is the Pip/Magwitch interaction, and even then there's some frisson there (especially their first meeting); it just doesn't pan out in a way that feels strong to me.